Today, due to busy life and work environment, it is often difficult to reach a person on their telephone and many people still do not have answering machines or subscribe to voice messaging systems. If a called party does not have an answering machine or does not subscribe to a voice messaging service, it becomes difficult to leave a message for the called party.
Conventional voice messaging systems utilize a call forwarding feature to forward a call from a called number to a voice messaging system upon a busy status or a no-answer status. In order to enable this call forwarding feature, telephone users pay a monthly fee to their local telephone service provider. The voice messaging system is typically under the control of the local telephone service provider. However, there is no system available to receive voice messages from a telephone service provider's voice messaging system without subscribing to the voice messaging service of the local telephone service provider.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for systems and methods that overcome the limitations and drawbacks of conventional systems by allowing a calling party to leave a message on a voice messaging system, and having the called party dial the messaging system to play the message at a later time, even when the called party does not subscribe to a messaging system from the local telephone service provider.